Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Emma Gittens on Hash (no pun intended)

Emma sent me her response to Hash. Read it below (it's detailed and very insightful):

I found Hash an enjoyable if at times disorienting read. As I am a reader who likes, if not a perfectly linear narrative, for all the threads to be neatly tied up at the end I found myself a few times reading back on myself, for example so as not to confuse the 'real' and 'fictitious' Avaback and Avaberg in the perhaps vain hope that being aware of the difference would help my understanding of the narrative.

I don't know how the carnivores found it but as a vegetarian it took a huge leap of imagination to imagine the assorted hashes as delicious (even given their historical / cultural context), especially as the recipes seemed to become more gruesome as the story progressed! But then some folks love eating nose-to-tail... I'm intrigued as to whether any members of the group were tempted to seek out or make their own hash? Maybe there's a new TV show for Heston Blumenthal in there somewhere...

The female characters I felt were rather underwritten, shown mostly cooking for, conversing with or caring for the male characters, without much in the way of backstory, inner thoughts or character development. Their worth seemed to be defined by their ability to cook, as shown by the evocative scene in which Eva laboriously spends a whole day preparing capercaillie in a vain attempt to distract Lars from his hash mission, which she rightly fears will take him away from her. She is jealous when he goes to sample Rachel's hash and resigned to defeat when he states his intention to try Ellen's hash, as if eating another woman's, ahem, meat were a somewhat crude metaphor for infidelity. I also noticed that whilst much is made of Ellen's grotesque appearance (illustrating the intoxicating power of her hash when Lars falls for her after one taste) nothing is mentioned of Eva's. Lars and Bertil are said to be young, Robert is middle-aged with a 'somewhat spongy body' but (unless I missed a crucial line in the text) Eva's physical appearance, and even her age, remains a mystery (were she the same age as her husband - if indeed the narrator and Manfred were one and the same - was at the beginning of the book she would be in her 50's). I would be interested to know how other people imagined her; in my head I made her young and attractive but that's probably because that's how love-interest characters are conventionally presented. In their first meeting Lars describes her hash as 'excellent', proclaiming to have 'never enjoyed anything so much in my life'. Is this a factor in their subsequent relationship and a comment on the women's desirability being closely related to the quality of the hash they cook?

It seemed like each of the relationships provided the characters with something they needed: Eva gave Lars and Robert sustenance in the form of shelter and delicious local food, Lars and Robert gave each other friendship based on their shared interests and outsiders' fascination with hash, Lars gave Eva the physical intimacy she had been missing since the hospitalisation of her husband and also an imagined immunity from tuberculosis, and they all gave Bertil subjects to observe (though they don't 'mix' with him, he is always on the sidelines, as the characters themselves sometimes remind him).

Bertil, being a physical mirror-image of himself, also acts as a mirror to the behaviour of the other characters, telling them quite straight what he thinks of their actions and motivations. He seems to pride himself on what I would describe as his omniscience, though when I looked up the word I found it described as both 'all-knowing' and 'all-seeing' - in Bertil's case he can only 'know' what he can actually see (a mirror cannot reflect objects that are not in its gaze) which drives him crazy when he is unable to see what Robert is watching. He attacks Robert, whose only response is 'Has justice caught up with me at last?', suggesting that Robert suspected Bertil knew of his true identity, though Bertil's response 'What justice?' suggests he didn't, maybe as he can only know what he himself has observed, not past events from Nazi Germany.

I saw parallels with the description of Ellen and that of the cow that the young Lars drank milk from - both were clearly diseased but Lars' hunger was so great he overlooked this to consume their respective tuberculosis-riddled hash / milk. Maybe with Ellen he was subconsciously looking to repeat the experience with the cow, as having tuberculosis and being in the sanatorium had been a happy time in his life? Or maybe he wanted to 'upgrade', repeating his relationship with Eva with Ellen, exchanging his immunity for her (superior) hash? This is quite a subversive suggestion as conventionally the less physically attractive a woman is, the less attractive she will be to men. What is for sure is that the stronger the taint of tuberculosis, the more delicious the hash.

I was completely perplexed at the appearance in his own book of Torgny Lindgren as a young boy - did anyone come away with more than just a big hanging question mark about that?

The beginning of the book reads, 'Without writing, time simply flows by. If anyone had asked him what he had been doing all these years... he would have answered that he didn't know.' Writing gave him a purpose, it made him get out of bed, dress up in a smart bow-tie and work for hours on end. When the council forbade him from writing, it seemed they were trying to get rid of this pesky old man by removing the one thing that was keeping him going in life. The removal of Linda I saw as deliberate, as her friendship and interest in his work was giving him something to live for. The shaving of his head and the subsequent exchange between him and Niklas, 'Does it really have to be like this?' / 'Yes, and that's how it's going to be from now on.' I saw as dehumanising and quite sad. The removal of his brandy and snuff too, his life's little pleasures. Whilst I was happy to suspend my disbelief for the rest of the story, the final chapter I felt was him retreating completely into his imagination to deal with his now miserable and lonely existence, the loose tooth a symbol of his renewed decay and perhaps imminent death. In this last passage, Linda returns, assures him repeatedly that she isn't abandoning him, and in an outlandish twist, even by this book's standards, it turns out she has discovered a mountain made entirely of gold, that they are rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that she has come back for him to 'give [him] back [his] freedom and life and creativity' before she swaps his pyjamas for a smart suit and they leave the care home forever in a chauffeur-driven limousine. I believed all the rest of the story, but not this, and finished the book feeling unexpectedly sad. Looking again at the ending though, I can also totally see it as it being the 'closing chapter' of his life, with Linda (dressed in white) appearing like an angel to escort him to a place where, 'he would be able to drink and above eat just what his heart most yearned for'. No prizes for guessing what that would be...

1 comment:

Excellent -thought-provoking stuff Emma,- Many Thanks.I would only comment about the female charactersbeing underwritten--defined by their abilityto cook. By and large -in poor rurals areas-that is the way it was .My Swedish mother--was theonly female of 7 siblings,and from very earlydays--she was entrusted to perform domesticduties ,and was defined accordingly.Althoughher father was the village Headmaster,anything beyond a rudimentary education for her was not an option.